Sohini Ramachandran

Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Director, Center for
Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI

Sohini Ramachandran joined the faculty of Brown University in July 2010, after spending three years
as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Professor John
Wakeley’s group at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
She completed her PhD in 2007 with Professor Marcus Feldman at Stanford University’s Department
of Biological Sciences. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, US National
Institutes of Health, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The research in the Ramachandran lab addresses problems in population genetics and evolutionary theory,
via inference from and analysis of present-day human genomes. Ramachandran’s research covers a range
of questions such as: what loci are under strong adaptive selection in the human genome? (Sugden et al.
2018, Nature Communications, “Localization of Adaptive Variants in Human Genomes Using Averaged One-
dependence Estimation); are there genetic pathways we can identify that underlie common diseases such as
diabetes? (Nakka et al. 2016, Genetics, “Gene and Network Analysis of Common Variants Reveals Novel
Associations in Multiple Complex Diseases”); and, are patterns of variation in human genomes similar to
those of cultural traits like language? (Creanza et al. 2015, PNAS, “A Comparison of Worldwide Phonemic
and Genetic Variation in Human Populations”).

At SCAS, Ramachandran will pursue two new research directions: 1) integrating ancient DNA and modern
genomes into the inference of human population history (via collaboration with the Evolutionary Biology
Centre), and 2) developing a novel statistical framework for multi-ethnic disease mapping studies.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2018-19.